Kingman, Indiana

In 1993, six months removed from college graduation, I decided it was time to become a serious dirt biker. I bought a serious dirt bike and spent the winter carving out trails on land my dad rented for farming in east-central Illinois. Over the next couple years, this was my practice track and my little piece of heaven. Fast forward to May of 2000, where I found myself at a farm near Kingman, Indiana racing on terrain almost identical to my 1990s happy place. Maybe it’s true you can’t really go home again, but racing in west-central Indiana was close enough.

The long Memorial Day weekend was an opportunity to return to Kingman and stop in on my parents, who I rarely visited without my KTM in tow. Even without a race nearby, their backyard encompassed 600 acres, so the dirt bike was mandatory. I could tinker with the motorcycle inside the farm shop and wash it down afterwards, without worry of which neighboring yard the mud would flow into.

Kingman’s proximity to the state line put the race on both the AMA District 15 (Indiana) and District 17 (upper 2/3’s of Illinois) hare scramble schedules. The event might have been considered a border war of sorts, in an area where rural Indiana begins to resemble the rough-cut terrain of Kentucky and Tennessee. Barely ten miles southeast was Turkey Run State Park, where hard enduro might have found a home if not for the great state of Indiana preserving the land for the masses.

At the staging area I registered for the Big B class and walked a portion of the course. Sunny skies had dried out the trails a bit, leaving them in fine shape for racing after rains earlier in the week. Gone were the spray painted pie plate trail markers from the 2000 race, now upgraded to standard-issue orange arrows. The sponsoring club may have elevated its game in course markings, but an old school parade lap let all comers know this event would stay true to the 1980s. For those readers unfamiliar with the concept, a parade lap is a gathering of all entrants, fully geared up and ready to ride, about an hour before the scheduled starting time. A club member leads the group en masse through the course, for the purpose of familiarizing riders with the trail. The parade lap is, for me anyway, a test of one’s patience. When more than 100 riders proceed at a trail riding pace in one large group, there is but one certainty: It will be slow. An obstacle handled easily by 99% of the riders will be screwed up by the remaining 1%, leaving the larger group stalled in a long, motionless line of motorcycles. In the warm, breezeless woods, goggles tend to fog, radiators release clouds of steam and impatient riders (such as your humble correspondent) seethe with frustration. I cannot recall how many times I’ve waited a near-eternity for my turn at an offending obstacle and wondered aloud how anyone could have been challenged by it. On the other hand, I do recall a few instances where I slowed entire groups of riders to a crawl after failing to remove a rag from the airbox or forgetting to turn on the fuel. Sometimes the frustration goes both ways.

But I digress.

The real purpose of the parade lap was to offer a course preview without wasting energy walking the trails. For that I was thankful. But I would rather the promoters had taken a page from the Missouri Hare Scrambles Championship series and set riders onto the course with a practice lap at their leisure, where I could turn loose my KTM 300EXC at a semi-race pace and work out my arm pump. This was not to be at Kingman, so I completed my “sighting” lap and made a few last minute mechanical adjustments before proceeding to the starting area.

Unlike the previous race at Kahoka, the KTM fired on the first kick and had me near the front of the pack for all of 200 yards before I rubbed handlebars with another rider and killed the engine. A quick restart minimized lost time, and from there I followed the pack into the narrow trees and thick underbrush. Part of the challenge enjoyed by racers is the roughness of trails such as these, not only at ground level, but at eye level and every other level in between. Our sport is quite possibly the only motorized competition where nature is allowed to reach out, in clothesline fashion, and separate heads from torsos. Those opportunities came early and often in the Kingman course, where leafy tree branches kissed goggles and low hanging limbs knocked even more sense out of unsuspecting riders than they’d already lost in their choices to shell out absurd monies buying expensive toys, then outfitting the beautiful machines with thousands more dollars of fancy accoutrements and gadgets. The shiny silver exhaust pipes, the reworking of suspension, the lightweight wheels and engine modifications all promised additional speed. None of that, however, made a lick of difference when the rider and motorcycle lie on the ground while everyone else moved forward. The Kingman course jousted more than a few riders into the dirt, but not me. I knew a thing or two about these kinds of woods, quietly praising my good fortune to be racing where I felt most comfortable.

My forearms, on the contrary, loudly pronounced their discomfort on the first lap. Without a real practice lap, the arm pump which should have already been gone, now worked its way to my wrists. The antidote is relaxation, but hare scrambles aren’t exactly a leisurely undertaking. I pushed through the pain to the end of the lap, passed through the main checkpoint and was then instructed to line up again for a restart. The race had been red-flagged because of an injury to a rider in one of the rows behind my class, leaving the last of the racers unable to begin before the lead riders completed their first lap.

My wish for practice had been granted.

Arm pump now gone, I jumped into a similar position on the restart and managed to avoid any bar banging. The Big B class leaders, well acquainted with the course, left me like bad oysters from the 801 Chop House back in ’98. Unlike the offending mollusks, I did hope to see these guys again, if only I could find the speed. Turns out the local racers know this kind of terrain pretty well themselves and showed me how real men ride it. As usual, we spread out over the course on the first lap and I gradually settled into a comfortable pace, remembering the nuances of 2nd gear trails. As soon as I could give the throttle a good twist, the course sharply changed direction, with greenery blocking any real view of what was to come around the next corner.

At these slow speeds, the relatively short course was a 15-minute affair. The club had worked in a few wide trails to break up the constant clutch work of the tight trails, even adding a deep, rock-filled ravine to throw off the Indiana and Illinois regulars who only see that sort of boulder at Turkey Run’s famous Punch Bowl. The only punch here was a tree or three, aiming low limbs at my bruised helmet. The rest of the course felt just like Indiana should, with rapidly deteriorating creek crossings and plenty of ruts.

On the second lap, at the last uphill climb before the scoring barrels, I noticed my sister and nephew beside the trail with eyes fixated on every passing motorcycle. Laura and Kyle came to witness firsthand the sight of men just as peculiar as their brother/uncle, flying through the woods as if Bigfoot were inches from snacking on an arm or leg. After the race, Laura would admit that while she knew I was riding an orange motorcycle, “They all sort of look the same.” I suspected as much and gave a wave and a healthy shout each time I climbed that final hill. She also concluded the riders whose engines screamed up the hill seemed to be “showing off” and I clearly wasn’t. I agreed those guys in the Pro and A classes with their loud and aggressive riding styles and sponsorship deals and garages full of trophies could surely tone it down a bit for the rest of us.

The remaining laps became easier in some aspects and more difficult in others. Rain during the week had drained from the high ground, but low areas and creek crossings had yet to recover. On my next-to-last lap, the worst of those crossings stopped me in my tracks in a spot where good fortune placed several strong onlookers, all able and willing to pull me up the creek bank.

The race ended with a respectable 5th place finish, a top-third of class result for which I was mostly happy. Killing time as results were tabulated, Laura and Kyle and I took in the minibike race in progress. Within a few minutes, Kyle begged the question few mothers wish to hear: "When can I start racing?" The answer was something to the effect of "when you don't live in my house anymore." Tough luck, kid.